Coca-Cola - Mirage

February 03, 2013 |
:30

In an elaborate follow-up to Coca-Cola's 2012 "Polar Bowl," in which the ads reflected the way the Super Bowl was actually unfolding, the marketer and Wieden & Kennedy in 2013 urged Super Bowl viewers to go online to decide whether showgirls, cowboys or "badlanders" would win a desert race to a giant bottle of Coke.

This Super Bowl spot set up the contest; the conclusion aired in a 30-second ad right after the game.

The execution was an evolution from 2012, where there could have been more follow-through, according to Pio Schunker, senior VP-integrated marketing communications for the Coca-Cola North America Group. "You had people coming in and saying, 'This is actually amazing' and deciding they wanted to follow us," she told Ad Age in 2013. "But then we never did anything [else] worthy of being followed. ... We missed a huge opportunity, and we wanted to course correct."

In order to pull that off, a team of over 60 people set up a "war room" and worked from that Sunday morning until the end of the game, monitoring social media, user engagement and site metrics. The surging traffic almost crashed the site’s servers, but at in this particular case, the power outage in the Superdome gave the team enough time to deal with the technical issues.

The showgirls won in the end. (For an earlier Super Bowl battle over a giant Coke, go watch "It's Mine" from the 2008 game.)